At the heart of Forecaster sits its powerful prediction engine. By examining the market, analysing historical performance and studying buying behaviours it makes smarter and more accurate predictions, telling you how much you should spend to make the most profit, where to spend it and when. It plans, executes and optimises campaigns too, continuously diagnosing, fine-tuning and improving performance. Forecaster combines the best in predictive technology with a team of retail experts and world-class data scientists.
Forecaster understands how shoppers shop. It does this by learning from every sale, every click and every impression. It combines historic sales information with data it collects on external buying triggers like seasonality, weather, TV events, location, promotions, stock and offline segmentation. This insight into consumer behaviour enables Forecaster to predict more accurately and extend the reach of its forecasting from a single day to a week ahead. It models the most profitable channels and ad spend for each product, and gives you precise revenue forecasts, optimised campaigns and ongoing diagnostics.
Align with seasonal forecasting
Forecaster understands and models the performance of each keyword, product and marketing channel across the year. By clustering common seasonal behaviours across thousands of keywords Forecaster classifies 75 different buying patterns that provide highly accurate predictions of seasonal demand for each and every one of your products and marketing channels.
This ensures it knows when and where to spend the budget every week of the year including public holidays and, most importantly, the Christmas peak season.
Take advantage of weather events
Forecaster learns how weather affects buying behaviour by comparing sales figures with daily 10-day weather forecasts across the UK. It maps weather-related products, correlating their sales performance to the incidence of weather events and temperature differences. Forecaster not only identifies these causal relationships, it also quantifies the impact of weather changes on demand. It predicts how much sales of specific product types will increase by reviewing weekly weather forecasts, helping you direct your budget to where and when demand is greatest.
Target by location
Forecaster uses specific and regional location data to inform buying patterns and campaign formats. Weather events are tracked in 26 UK locations, campaigns are split-tested across alternative geographies and real-time stock availability by store is automatically imported into marketing campaigns.
Maximise promotional uplift
Forecaster allows you to respond to the effects of promotional offers by automatically changing creatives across thousands of campaigns in real time. By anticipating uplift Forecaster enables you to budget selectively, capitalise on promotions more effectively and plan your promotional campaigns with much greater confidence.
Match campaigns to stock availability
Forecaster significantly reduces budget wastage by automatically pausing or restarting marketing campaigns based upon the availability of stock. Campaign text is changed dynamically to reflect product pricing and availability, either for individual products or across portfolios of products.
Synchronise with TV events
Forecaster monitors terrestrial and satellite TV channels in real time, identifying events such as TV adverts that drive consumers to search and buy. It creates a digital finger-print of each ad, enabling instant detection and activation of marketing across search and display within a few seconds of the ad airing. It allows you to take full advantage of any relevant advertising, whether your own, your suppliers’ or your competitors’. By anticipating TV-related uplift and instantly synchronising your campaigns with advertising events Forecaster gives you maximum return from your budget.
Optimise with customer segmentation
Forecaster maximises your profit by gearing marketing performance to customer value instead of Cost Of Sale. By aligning the sale of a product to the lifetime value of a customer Forecaster optimises beyond a single transaction and makes your marketing investment go much further.
Forecaster takes your budget and generates an accurate revenue forecast to a 95% confidence interval. It recommends the optimal mix of investment across PPC, Shopping and Display, and compares actual performance with predicted performance to maximise your profit and margin. It combines media data, efficiency targets, and transactional information with external purchase buying triggers to provide reliable forecasts from one to seven days in advance.
Forecaster uses historical data and buying trigger information to understand where to place bids to achieve the most probable gains. It then automatically applies real-time bid changes directly to advertising platforms such as Google and Bing at product, creative and keyword level.
Forecaster diagnoses and fine tunes your campaigns in real time. It creates workflows to assess campaign performance and delivers detailed recommendations on where and how to achieve the greatest improvements. Diagnostics are continually reviewed by Forecaster’s team of data scientists and the prediction engine tuned to produce the best results for each retailer.
